


two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl (the anatomy of apocalypse. remix)

by coffeesuperhero



Category: West Wing
Genre: Apocalypse, Dark, F/M, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-15
Updated: 2012-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-03 17:20:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesuperhero/pseuds/coffeesuperhero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If wishes were horses, they would all have pale riders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl (the anatomy of apocalypse. remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [furies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furies/gifts).
  * Inspired by [anatomy of apocalypse.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/35567) by [furies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furies/pseuds/furies). 



> The characters belong to Sorkin; the title belongs to a song by Pink Floyd. Once upon a time, furies wrote an incredible story, and I hope I've done it justice in the retelling.

The world ends on a Tuesday. 

Eliot's explanation is not incorrect, but it is incomplete: the end comes with a bang, while the whimpers echo after. 

\+ 

"Sam," she says, and for days the only words available to either of them are names, and not always their own: they weep for the loss of the people they love as much as they mourn their own survival. Clinging to each other and to life, unwilling to accept the loss of their ideals along with the rest of their world, they wait out the last gasps of civilization.

She loses hope before he does, but she has always been so much more practical.

In the final days of its existence, the Federal Emergency Management Agency urges all citizens to remain indoors. It's less of an order and more of a death rattle, and it does not account for the roving gangs of mad, poisoned people who are sick with hunger and fear and desperation, people who are the things that go bump, and not just at night. 

After a few days, the screams get too close to ignore. They will surely die if they leave, but they will die if they remain. The choice they are making is not one of life or not, but of which new horror will take it from them. 

They must leave what is left of the city; they must grieve as they go. 

Grief is less portable than he had anticipated. It has a gravity of its own, a weight, a mass. 

They have no destination in mind. There are no directions anymore, no sense of forward and back, only breathing and not, a state of being that matters less with every exhausting intake of breath. 

Survival is not a choice that they are making, it is merely a state of existence that will continue until it does not.  
+

The smoldering wreckage of the Pentagon is worse than the crumbling dust of any of any of the monuments. He had not known how much he had depended on its strength until the day that it failed. 

\+ 

There's a postcard in his pocket. He finds it at the bottom of a pile of rubble in a lost building in a lost town in a lost world. 

_Wish you were here_ , it says. The font is bright and bold. 

He cannot leave it behind, though there is no one to send it to, and no one on whom he would wish such a fate. 

+

On a moonless night outside a decaying town, her hand slips into his, her mouth seeking him out. For a brief moment, she seems just as surprised as he is, but then she presses her body against him and they are resurrected, warm and alive, breath back in their lungs and hearts pumping oxygenated blood, carrying life to every lost and lonely cell in their bodies. 

He says that he loves her. She sighs, her breath a puff of hot carbon dioxide in his ear. 

+

They spend a night in the shadow of the dead husk of a burned out nuclear power station, and he dreams of death and decay and screams at the horrors his unconscious mind has shown him. Later, with his throat raw from shouting, he asks her why she did not wake him from his nightmares. She only stares dully back and says, "You didn't sleep." 

+

Half-life is the amount of time it takes for a decaying substance to decrease by fifty percent. The half-life of plutonium-238 is approximately twenty-five thousand years, or 109 seconds.

The half-life of a person existing in the vicinity of plutonium-238 does not need to be measured exponentially. 

\+ 

When it is her time to sleep, he sits on the burnt ground and watches the cavernous expanse of thick ashen clouds that conceals the stars that travelers once used to light their way home. Even the illuminating glow of Polaris cannot pierce these clouds, but it is of no consequence: there is little use for celestial navigation when they have no terrestrial destination. 

In a perpetual waking nightmare they trudge on through the wasteland of the world, communicating mostly through gestures, if at all. There is little to say that isn't as empty as they are, and as words begin to lose their meaning he tries, desperately, to hold onto language, the last best vestige of his humanity. When he can no longer summon the will to create sentences, he murmurs hollow words, any words he can recall, under invisible stars that died millions of years before he did. Stars are really only dead husks of gas and flame that look alive unless you know better, unless you know that what you're seeing is a lie that is older than the world. 

When he looks at her he sees the stars. When he looks for the stars he sees nothing. 

Somewhere above the smoke and ash and sulfuric acid aerosol there are still stars, and among them is Galileo. Centuries ago Galileo Galilei looked up at the stars, and for performing that miracle they told him that he was a sinner. Now he wanders a celestial battlefield littered with dead and dying heavenly bodies, exiled for eternity to the vast cold vacuum of space. 

Galileo. He said it right, once. Now he says nothing. 

\+ 

She lost her necklace a long time ago. This time, he did not find it.

"We'll find another one," he said, but he knew that it was a lie. It wasn't even a good one. 

He doesn't know when she stopped reaching for it, when her hands stopped seeking out the simple silver metal, a chain that linked her present to a happier past. There's no comfort at the end of the world, not from the things they used to carry and not from each other.  


+

The mechanics of sex are easy-- fingers here, mouths there, dry hot skin against dirty mattresses or cold ground, murmuring platitudes and promises in a predictable pattern of pathetic prattling, proffering prayerful petitions to gods who ceased to be when the colors of the world faded to grey. 

It's the words that are difficult, both to remember and to say. He still tells her he loves her. He still tells her that the words will come back to them. But the truth will not set them free, here in the predicate of this sentence, here in the dying light, where truth hardly matters, if it even still exists. They are a subordinate clause; they are intransitive verbs. 

It doesn't matter how they begin and it will matter to no one when they end. They are falling, even when they reach the climax of these sordid little vignettes. They are in the denouement of the story of the world, and there is no action but falling. 

+  
They no longer call each other by name. They don't name the dead; they don't name themselves. 

He tries to remember her name, but today he can only think of Flamingo, and she can only stare out at the river that is too deep to cross. Dead things float on the water, birds and fish and plants and other creatures that had names, once. None of them were Flamingo.

They turn away.

+

There's a house in a field, or what was a field, once upon a time. He stares out the broken window and dreams of purple mountains and fruited plains. Oh beautiful for cold grey skies, for ashen fields of grain. 

Somewhere, far away, in a collapsed, burned-out shell of a building is his talent. It can't have gone far. 

They find food. They eat with their hands, ignoring the open drawer full of flatware. 

+

She begins to sing in her sleep. She sings, sleeping, while he is awake naming the defunct stars that litter a lost sky in bright coffins of combustible matter.

She sings about bones. X-rays will let you see bones, but gamma rays will reduce you to them. 

His wrists are thinner now, and his teeth are no longer his friends. 

His friends have given their atoms back to the universe and thus will they live forever, but he will continue to die, dwindling on, life dwarfed by the stench of death that covers every place on this wide world where people used to dwell.

There are three words in the English language that begin with the letters "dw," but there is no one here to care. He'd do well to remember that.

+

There are cracks in the wall of the house where they sleep and cracks in the floorboards, too. She quantifies the bones of her fingers while he qualifies their continued existence. They don't sleep: only those who died are sleeping, and they may be dying, but they are a present participle, not yet past.

He has to find something to cover the cracks in the walls, but he has nothing, only his meaningless words.

He writes. He papers the walls with nouns, verbs, adjectives, with gerunds and infinitive phrases. He writes their story; he writes their nightmare. He writes until his hands are aching, the weak muscles of his arms burning. There's blood on his hands and he doesn't know where it has come from, but the wall is wet and now the house is bleeding, too. He looks up to read what he has written, but the wall only says, _Wish you were here_.

+

The dull light in the sky means that it is morning, but day or night it is always time for mourning. Their lives are nothing but a long lamentation, a tortured sigh, an echoing whimper.

If only the words still mattered. He tells her that they do, but all he does lately is lie. If she counted his lies instead of her bones, she would never stop counting. 

The words don't matter, and neither does any of the rotting matter that makes up his body. He used to be able to compose a symphony in words and phrases, but now all he can do is sit and wait for all of his constituent atoms to decompose.

\+ 

Their clothes are thin and threadbare. Underneath her raggedy garments her skin is like a diaphanous translucent gown, and sometimes he looks at her and thinks she should have flowers in her hair and a children's song on her lips, lamenting the loss of a brother at the hands of someone she loved. 

He doesn't remember what flowers look like, and he doesn't know a hawk from a handsaw at any time of day, no matter which way the wind blows. There are no leaves to be tickled by a silent wind, no flowers to sway and bend when it calls. 

They have no rosebuds left to gather, and soon the ground shall have them. He has no posies in his pockets, just a postcard, but there are ashes all around, and language will not save them from falling. 

They fall, they are falling, they have fallen, they will have fallen, they fell; they rise, they are rising, they have risen, they will rise, they rose. 

Roses are red, violets are blue, she is dying and he is too, and two is the loneliest number at the end of the world, world without end, amen. 

From his pocket there is a rustling. _Wish you were here_ , mocks the postcard. He hates it. He would set it on fire, but someone might see, and he has no strength left to tear it apart. 

\+ 

She's collecting bones, and he's writing a novel that has no words, a magnum opus of silence. 

All around him, the world is fading, but the lettering on the postcard that he carries is still vibrant, its cheerfully malevolent greeting tethering him to endless days of desolation and decay. It wishes for him to be here, and here he remains, until only his remains are left.

 _Wish you were here._ If wishes were horses, they would all have pale riders. He has no wishes, but they are both pale, and they are both riding out the race of life until they breathe their last.


End file.
